Herbal Medicine Essay

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Recommended: Western medicine perspective on traditional native american medicine

Herbal medicine is the traditional medical practice and it’s an important part of medicine to this day. To treat different ailments there are various indigenous systems such as Siddha, Ayurveda, Unani and Allopathy use differnt plant species1. Allopathic medicine is a system of medicine that focuses primarily on reacting disease rather than on promoting health. The use of herbal medicine is popular due to toxicity and side effects of allopathic medicines. Cancer is presently responsible for about 25% of all deaths in US and other developed countries. On a yearly basis, 0.5% of the population is diagnosed with cancer. It can be treated with chemotherapy, immunotherapy, targeted therapies etc., but all these have side effects and that is why botanical treatment turns useful. There were 14.1 million new cancer cases, 8.2 million cancer deaths and 32.6 million people living with cancer (within 5 years of diagnosis) reported by IARC in 2012 worldwide. Breast and ovarian cancer are the major cause of cancer death in American women, with an estimated 44,190 lives lost (290 men and 43,900 women) in the United States2. Studies revealed that in India, 555,000 national cancer deaths in 2010. 71% cancer deaths occurred in people aged 30-69 years in India. At 30-69 years, the three most common fatal cancers were oral, stomach, and lung in men, and cervical, stomach and breast in women. About 42% of male and 18.3% of female cancer deaths are due to tobacco-related products3. Many plants and plant derived products are used in cancer therapy as cytotoxic agents. Examples include Taxol that is used for breast cancer (which gets its active constituent from Pacific Yew tree) and the vinca alkaloids used for leukaemia (from the Madagascar ... ... middle of paper ... ...the body. Radiation can also cause damage to normal tissue. Thus chemotherapy acts in a harmful way. Here lies the fundamental difference between the chemotherapy and herbal medicine. In chemotherapy the chemicals act on the body, causing harm to the body, actively disrupting the vital processes interfering, interrupting, impairing in a dynamic manner whereas, in contrast the body acts on herb resulting in the restorative, curative and yet passive influences of herbal medicine. The rhizomes of Sansevieria roxburghiana is reported to possess anticancer activity18,20. So far there is no bioactivity guided fractionation studies on anticancer activity of rhizomes of Sansevieria roxburghiana. Therefore, a detailed investigation of the rhizome of Sansevieria roxburghiana is needed to establish scientific data on the anticancer potential using various cell lines.

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